Category: PROJECT

Although I would consider communication one of my strengths I have found myself struggling with how to communicate and effectively explain ideas and concepts that are incomplete and beyond my skill set.

Paul has helped us with this idea and really it comes back to the old rhyme, ‘how do you eat and elephant? one bite at a time’. I know understand that its ok to not have my ideas set in stone and realisation before presenting them. In fact sometimes the only way we can actually make and construct or plans is when we share them and we involve other people and their expertise.

So in trying to communicate our ambitious project concept I have broken it down into ‘bite’ sizes in the way of story boarding.

The images below are draft plans of a slide presentation of our project concept to be presented on the 1st of September. Our group has chosen to collaborate via google docs (this can be seen here: http://bit.ly/2bvtbFh )

After making this story board I then decided to film the interactive website the block as a visual illustration of our inspiration. I time lapsed it and the video will be embedded to our presentation but is also shown here:

After reading through the history of Everleigh street (the setting of the block – stories from a meeting place) I found this amazing quote about the producers motivation which is almost exactly the same as our intentions and written in a beautiful way.

“For decades, the Block has been plagued by stories of drugs, crime and tragedy, but there have been other, richer stories as well. The goal of this production was to capture the heart and spirit of a place that cannot be summed up by one story or one narrative, but many.”

The Block is an amazing interactive web resource that Dan showed us and has given our group a large amount of inspiration. You can find this resource here: http://www.sbs.com.au/theblock/#

I found these images to add to our collaborate slides and am pleased with the progress so far.

I have also been collaborating my group team members presentation notes and collaborating them into a documents to be used as a hand out for our presentation assessors. I thought this would be a good idea as it shows we are passionate, organised and willing to put effort into our projects completion. The assessors handout is a tangible extension of our google slide presentation and may suffice the accessors different learning styles e.g. Aural, visual, and verbal.

I found it very helpful and a release of stress to be able to learn how to visually communicate my ideas so people can better comprehend them and also get involved themselves.

It is imperative for our project group to communicate our plans as our concept is beyond our current skill set, however, we believe our kiosk could be a great asset and attraction to the Kroad business association.

Today I organised and wrote the project presentation for our group as we look to present next week at the Noho Marae. I then used Google slides to create a power point presentation for the other team members to edit and wrote the introduction message. as seen below.

“We are team four, despite sifting through many ideas of possible paper creations in our planning stages one theme stood out to us as a group from the beginning, and that was the idea of culture. In our team of 6 people we have over 6 cultures representing. We acknoledged that we all have our distinctive cultural specialties but yet all were here in New Zealand for this time. We thought our team is actually so representative of New Zealand in particularly Auckland in 2016, we are a multi-cultural scoiety – ‘Its who we are’

Did you know that one quarter of people living in New Zealand were born overseas, Put your hand up if you identify as one of these people. This statistic was most recently taken in 2013, and I would believe that in 2016 we would have more that one quarter of people who were born outside new Zealand and many many more 2nd and 3rd generations.

New Zealand is made up like a jigsaw, we are many different ethnicities with different strengths and talents, so we decided to make a patchwork project to represent this idea.”

I also helped the team create the summative code of conduct for professional practise. and helped the team organise what work they have left to do. While the boys worked on sticking the rest of the waves up.

Previous to the class this morning I went to spotlight to see what types of paper we could get to create our patch work after creating the list of districts and corresponding signifiers.

Spotlight had a large selection of scrapbook paper but I only ended up buying two types, the silver reflective one for auckland and the black sparkly one representing coal for the otago district. I thought that I could print of the other types of graphic paper to be more economical and house the resources available to us at unitec.

After listening to Ginas presentation about our stay at the marae I also volunteered to write our script for our presentation as I believe that communication is probably one of my strengths but also I wasn’t sure all our team members were convicted they were coming to the marae or didn’t know what was going on.

I then went down to hire a projector in order for us to project the district outlines onto NZ to be able to accurately trace. We spent a long time trying to adjust it to fit our mould but then were able to trace it very easily.

Our team had also made some paper models of an idea to surround the island with blue waves.

After tracing the districts I went on to covering the otago district with my black paper that I had brought whilst Jaya made the covering for the canterbury area using metallic coloured papers to act as a symbol for the stainless window of the Christchurch cathedral.

However I cut the black paper wrong the first time so Paul suggested I collage it, and this actually worked better because the card was too thick to mould around the wall.

Whilst the team was out for lunch I researched other graphics for the districts remaining which was a lot, so I found a few prints and printed them off in the building one copy centre, it cost 12 dollars all together but it was printed very quickly so I got onto putting it up straight away.

This week we may lots of progress today, lee and myself covered a few the districts with the printed paper I got. Jaya and Alex did the Canterbury district and sonny came in later with the blue paper to make the waves. We only have one Thursday left of making before we need to get the video done for our marae trip. I hope all goes well but I feel really happy with the progress we have made.

In todays class it was freezing, it was hard to concentrate past the sniffly nose and numb fingers. however, Gina started the class by asking each individual group what has been their highlight and low light so far. For our team the low light what our continual changing plans and because of the our very late start. Our highlight so far has been our group dynamics, we haven’t had any conflict and disagreements have been handled strategically and peacefully.

We continued on our paper cache today and I brought in a hair dryer to help with the drying process, because it is so cold the glue hasn’t been drying fast as all and has been relying us from doing multiple layers quickly, we we only able to get one layer finished for the week. Therefore we brought the hairdryer today and Sonny brought some PVA glue, the PVA glue had a faster stick and a thicker solution so the paper was hanging on to the chicken wire better. We were able to get the rest of the news paper layer on as well as a white paper layer donated to us from Paul. I have found it a challenge to help with the paper mache all the time because only few people can work on it at one time due to the space but I was able to do majority of it including the white layer.

Paul also came and talked to us today about the time frame and other ideas of how we can maximise our project to fit the brief. So collectively we decided on a patch work idea. This involved each district of the Paper Mache New Zealand being covered in a paper symbolising its significance or reason for popularity within New Zealand. We chose to go with this idea for a few reasons.

Firstly it is time realistic, secondly, it fits our brief to inform and entertain an audience by having the paper giving the viewer information on New Zealand. Sort of like a patch work with every part of New Zealand holding a piece of importance to make the jigsaw of New Zealand. Thirdly, we believe this is celebrating paper more, showing the different colours, textures and uses for paper, rather than using other materials as we had previously thought. My only worry is what the cost will be.

So Jaya and I researched the districts of New Zealand and then recorded what they are known for and brainstormed paper ideas that corresponded with the significance of the district. I had fun doing this and enjoyed dreaming of what we could do, I love the ideas process. It was brain stretching as most of New Zealand is known for similar things, e.g.: beaches, scenery and farming, but each on slightly distinctive. for example we chose Northland to be a pohutakawa red paper representing they beaches in contrast to a graphic surf wave paper for Gisborne’s surf beaches.

Today we finally got started on our project and we were so productive !! Im so proud of our team and how much we did today, our project is finally coming alive.

I sent out a message to everyone the night before saying that we all really needed to be there and each member turned up and helped out 🙂

We had a brief teaching from Paul about the presentation logistics to be held on the 24th and 25th of June. Also Gina briefly spoke about making the distinction between filming the process of our project making journey compared to the filming on the end product. Gina said to “think of the camera work as an active integrated installation of the project.”

Shortly after this we got stuck into our project. Jaya and myself went to the technicians and borrowed a tripod for our filming and a data projector. We used this projector to project an outline of New Zealand onto our studio wall of which Alex and Sonny traced around with pencil.

We then had chicken wire to put on the inboard wall to act as our base for our papermache, Paul was very helpful in this process offering advice and tools. We eventually used a stable gun to attach it to the wall and cut off the excess with wire cutters. After using blunt cutters and getting many cuts myself from the wire Joe from another team offered his tools and we were done in no time.

After our full New Zealand was on the wall we started paper Maching. We finished the top side of the south island as the weather was very cold and it wasn’t drying in a hurry.

I feel really proud of my team, I think we have worked really well together and I have been impressed how everyone has pulled their weight and contributed. I believe I also contributed considerably as I brought resources from home for the paper mache and wire cutters, I took a sort of leadership role, I was the team cheerleaders, helping out where ever I could, wire cutting to paper Mache.

This week I have been at a conference but came in for the Thursday morning project day to be there for my team, ask questions and marked of the roll. I was very annoyed when the class started 40 minutes late because I had a lot of work to do in our team and also need to get back to my conference.

However, when the class started it was very useful. The class was about explaining what we should document as part of our project and how we can actually do it. I found the discussion very helpful and actively participated.

We then moved into our project rooms in which 4 of 6 of our team members were present. I had brought blue masking tape in to class in order for us to outline the NZ on the wall and Shuowei brought in lots of newspaper for us to use as materials.

We very early on chose the AV room as our project room, others came to us wanting some of the space but we had big ambitions. We wanted to make a cultural exhibition and thought the AV room would be perfect because of its large square shape and the access to the tv’s and projectors.

New plan

As we came to realise our ambition exceeded our capabilities. We realised our project was going to take up to much resources and time.

We were in the project class and all of a sudden I was bombarded by the realisation of how much time we had left and how much work we had dent done. So I approached the group and was completely honest, I don’t think this is achievable. They agreed and we set to work on down scaling.

Wow we have gone from 4 walls to 3 to making it smelled again as seen my our model drawing.

Then to have down scaled again to an outline of NZ divided by iwi regions.

The a 3d boarder containing paper made, origami styles icons that represent each culture that lives in New Zealand. We will use white printer paper because we think it will be a good surface to show tone and shadows on when hung on the wall of the AV room.

We have now made a schedule plan for the next 4 weeks to accomplish. We realised we need to start filming our processes as soon as possible to have content for the making our video presentation.

We have had problems with some people not turning up on Thursdays but I believe our communication on Facebook and text has been very good in notifying the team.

In our first discussion we highlighted just a few ideas that we may have seen or thought would be cool ideas, we brought them all together. We then attempted to go through and see which ones were going to be unachievable as my perception idea as seen below.

And then with what was left see how the differing ideas could be merged to accommodate different peoples interests and opinions. Through this whole time I didn’t feel like there was any conflict in our discussion, the team however is still learning to speak up, some more personalities are emerging which is cool too.

We came up with the 4 wall scene exploring different culture.

We then worked on the back story of the design, to add meaning to it. We explored the idea of migration, we check the dates to see if the project lined up with Matariki, theme of multicultural unity ect.

We then realised 4 wall scenes would be too large and scaled it down to 3 cultures represented in our group

Chinese

Polish

Pacific Island

We also looked into the idea of using recycled material to represent NZ clean green initiatives and also for the benefit of lower cost.

The first exercise we did that contributed to our project was to see all the resources that were available to us in the hope that ideas would stem out of it. This exercise was also good to get the group discussions going and learning to gel together as a team. We also saw just in the discussion process who was confident in speaking up and sharing ideas. I found it hard to begin with as I am personally a confident speaker whilst some of the other members were more reserved. I had to consciously be mindful not to say to much or come up with all the ideas to fill the silence.